Your Brain Is Vulnerable to Hacking. Companies Are Exploiting That.

Casinos, magicians, and the makers of social media platforms all know something about you: your mind is very vulnerable to influence. Just as the magician relies on limitations in your short term memory or visual acuity to accomplish sleight of hand, online software engineers leverage the limits of your mind to make their product addictive. From the sonorous ping of mobile phones to Facebook's highly nuanced algorithm, product makers understand that frequent reward is what keeps you coming back. And just like slot machines, the easier those rewards are to access, the more frequently we'll want them.